MySQL text search

Can I get surrounding words?

[sned]

Say I have a text field, filled with a few hundred words.

On a search (SELECT * FROM tbl WHERE fld LIKE '%word%'), is it possible to display only a few lines of the result, specifically those 'surrounding' the searched word?

Something like:

... this is the text surrounding word but I don't want it to go on and on ...

I know I can do this with php string parsing, but I'm curious to see if anyone knows how to do this in the query itself.

Thanks!
-sned

[jatar_k]

if in the select you grab the whole thing then you use strpos, find out where the word is and do substr at -10 and +10 then cut out partial words

something like that should work

[hakre]

this is for php, but you can do similar with mysql, too:

INSTR(str,substr)
Returns the position of the first occurrence of substring substr in string str. This is the same as the two-argument form of LOCATE(), except that the order of the arguments is reversed.

SUBSTRING(str,pos), SUBSTRING(str FROM pos), SUBSTRING(str,pos,len), SUBSTRING(str FROM pos FOR len)

The forms without a len argument return a substring from string str starting at position pos. The forms with a len argument return a substring len characters long from string str, starting at position pos. The forms that use FROM are standard SQL syntax. Beginning with MySQL 4.1.0, it is possible to use a negative value for pos. In this case, the beginning of the substring is pos characters from the end of the string, rather than the beginning. A negative value may be used for pos in any of the forms of this function.

MySQL Manual string functions [dev.mysql.com]

with these and other functions you should be able to implement it directly into your query and reduce the amount of data returned from your database server.

--hakre

[sned]

Thanks for the suggestions, I didn't realize had all those string functions.

Thanks!
-sned